OAKLAND — Quashing longstanding rumors that Oakland’s venerable children’s hospital will leave the city because of space constraints, the hospital’s new CEO said instead that satellite clinics in the outer East Bay will expand services.

“We can’t leave Oakland,” said Frank Tiedemann, president and CEO of Children’s Hospital and Research Center Oakland. “It’s important to have the hospital here.”

In a wide-ranging interview, Tiedemann spoke about the challenges of meeting the East Bay population’s needs as more families move to eastern Contra Costa and Alameda counties and beyond. And he said the hospital will beef up program for children ages 11 to 15, the fastest-growing segment of patients.

Tiedemann has been on the job since January 2005 and is the hospital’s first new CEO in nearly a quarter-century. Tony Paap ruled the hospital for 21 years and left a strong imprint.

Tiedemann clearly wants to make his own mark, and is eyeing closely the Bay Area’s shifting demographics and the changing nature of health care. “The bricks and mortar are the easy part,” he said. “It’s do we have the right mix of expertise to meet the community’s needs?”

Obesity and asthma are the two biggest health threats to Bay Area children, and Tiedemann said the hospital is taking a more multidisciplinary approach in both areas.

Forty percent of children treated at the hospital have health issues related to being overweight or obese — at least double the national average. Asthma is the number one cause of hospitalizations at Children’s Oakland.

The hospital’s Healthy Eating Active Living, or HEAL, clinic, for instance, looks at the whole picture in overweight and obese children, including self-esteem and eating habits. Patients are seen by a physician, nurse, exercise physiologist, dietitian and psychologist.

Tiedemann said HEAL is a national model because it looks at all aspects of a child’s life. “This is not about eating less,” he said. “It’s about helping kids grow up healthy.”

The number of children in the East Bay is growing, and the hospital’s inpatient volume increased by 7 percent and outpatient volume rose by 9 percent in 2005, Tiedemann said.

“In health care, if you’re not growing with the population, you’re not successful because someone else is taking care of those patients,” he said.

One key issue is how to care for children in families flocking to the eastern edges of Contra Costa and Alameda counties and into San Joaquin county in search of cheap housing and open spaces.

“It makes us think about how we take care of kids an hour or two away from us,” he said. “Distances and time involved mean they don’t come here as often, or just when they are very sick or injured.”

One solution is to expand existing satellite clinics in Pleasanton, Walnut Creek, Brentwood and Larkspur. Enhanced services will include diagnostics and follow-up care. The expansion reflects a nationwide trend toward giving medical care in an outpatient setting.

Alta Bates Summit Medical Center recently agreed to free up 20 beds for pediatric care on the Summit campus in Oakland. The unit, scheduled to open later this month, will first serve as overflow from Children’s Oakland for seasonal care, such as flu hospitalizations, but may evolve into a specialty pediatric clinic.

Eventually, Tiedemann envisions building another children’s hospital to meet the rapidly expanding Tri-Valley population. “But I don’t want to get too far ahead of myself here.”

In the meantime, the hospital must either rebuild or retrofit some of the Oakland campus to meet state seismic requirements by 2013. Cost estimates for the reconstruction are about $400 million over eight years, but Tiedemann wouldn’t commit to those numbers.

Details of the expansion plan won’t be ready until May 2007, though conceptual designs could come as early as this summer, he said.

In 2004, the hospital floated a proposal to develop the athletic fields at Laney College, but that idea met strong resistance and rumors swirled that the hospital would leave Oakland.

For the foreseeable future, the hospital will work with the space it’s got. Rebuilding will take resources, however. The hospital will get $72 million from Proposition 61, a $750 million statewide bond initiative passed by voters in 2004 for construction, expansion and equipment of children’s hospitals.

And the hospital hopes to double philanthropic fund-raising over the next decade from today’s $25 million, Tiedemann said.

After several years in the red — including a $14 million loss in 2002 — the hospital is in the black thanks to three years of cost-cutting measures. Last year, the hospital had $5 million in profits over a $250 million operating budget.

Tiedemann said it’s time to reassess the clinical side. This means looking at how the hospital is caring for 11- to 15-year-olds — and overcoming a longstanding view that Children’s Oakland is a “baby hospital,” he said. New clinics such as one devoted to sports medicine are part of that effort.

And it means branching out into new areas at the hospital’s $50 million-a-year research center. Tiedemann said he wants to see more “kids in beds” research on cancer and other diseases, and translational research where basic science is moved from the lab to clinical applications.

Basic science remains a priority, however. In partnership with the University of California, Berkeley, Children’s Oakland was one of the first grant recipients of the state’s new stem-cell research program. It received a $2.5 million training grant, though the funds are being held up do to legal challenges over the constitutionality of the state agency.

Tiedemann, who is originally from Illinois, was previously CEO of St. Mary’s Health System, a $330 million Catholic hospital in Indiana. He said that coming from a Catholic hospital, he wanted to make sure that any stem-cell research would meet the highest ethical standards. The hospital hired ethicists to help draft a policy for the research.

Although he doesn’t have prior experience running a children’s hospital, Tiedemann knows the area. In the early 1990s, he was vice president of corporate development at John Muir Medical Center in Walnut Creek.

And he clearly cares about the children treated at the hospital. At one point during the interview, he teared up talking about the many families who set up round-the-clock shifts at the hospital so their sick child is never alone.

“In the community there is a deep and sincere appreciation for what we do,” he said. “It’s spine-tingling.”